Santiane Group capitalizes on data with SAS® data visualization

Santiane Group, the largest health insurance broker in France, is using SAS® Visual Analytics to transform big data into improved sales. Santiane Group was the first online broker in France and is widely respected as an early adopter of technology. The purely online health insurance firm for individuals and businesses equipped its management teams with SAS, improving decision making with quick and easy data exploration on PCs and tablets.

"Thanks to the processing and analysis power of SAS Visual Analytics, we can extract rich and sometimes unexpected information from the large data volumes in our customer portfolio," said Alexandre Ginesty, CIO at Santiane Group. “SAS has enabled our actuaries to discover new variables explaining the behavior of our portfolio, sometimes going back to the earliest points of contact with customers."

As France’s leading Internet health insurance broker, Santiane Group is well-equipped to rise to the challenge of big data. The company’s rich analytics history, dating to 2007, includes online browsing enriched with data from Google and Facebook, new contract acquisitions, contract lifecycle details, and the commercial processing chain.

Santiane Group has always relied on new technologies. The transition to data visualization today is further enlightening its managers and making them more independent. On the iPad® or PC, they can develop their own indicators and share them collaboratively. There are several types of users of SAS Analytics at Santiane, including top management, finance, digital marketing and operations departments.

Sales representatives at its subsidiary, Néoliane Santé & Prévoyance, benefit in particular from the tablet version when working in the field. The organization is a wholesale broker for professionals whose sales teams focus on developing the network of partners in the field. For them, the geolocation features are particularly interesting, delivering a better overview of partners’ geographical implementation so they can track partner activities collaboratively using an iPad.

Once inert data now actively improves product design, both in terms of better risk segmentation for partners and aligning with customer needs. The Santiane Group is now fully digitized, down to electronic signing of insurance contracts, and optimizes the sale of health insurance contracts thanks to data and data visualization.

"Empowering our managers to explore data without requiring specific IT skills relieves our overstretched R&D," adds Ginesty. "SAS Visual Analytics’ great strength is its interoperability. It is not only connected to our systems, but also incorporates external data originating from Facebook and Google. With SAS, we selected the most successful data visualization tool in the market. SAS in-memory calculation power allows us to be more creative, due to its speedy response times."

The Santiane Group used SAS QuickStart for rapid deployment, providing access to early performance indicators in record time. The tool also saves time by providing a ready-to-deploy data model.

Since its launch in 2012, SAS Visual Analytics has more than 2,600 site licenses worldwide, including almost 100 projects in France.

About SAS

SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative analytics, business intelligence and data management software and services, SAS helps customers at more than 83,000 sites make better decisions faster. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW®.